Is it unfair having to “pay for bugs”?

Sometimes we get the question if it isn’t unfair that clients are charged for bugs and glitches. I fully understand this perspective.

Let me explain our perspective:

First of all, if a bug slips through QA we always consider it a type of failure. However, even the most quality-minded software development firms across the world will face such failures from time to time.

LiteBreeze has decided on a simple time and material pricing model as a result of our experience since starting off in 2004. We do however offer radical transparency and we do take responsibility if there would be major negligence on our part.

Eradicating bugs altogether is not feasible as the cost of quality assurance (QA) would increase prohibitively. Also, if a feature is reported as completed but doesn’t work as intended, the feature may not be fully developed and more time would be needed to finish it.

There might be a miscommunication of the scope.

If we would discount time spent by developers on bugs and features reported as incomplete, our billable rate would go down and that cost would need to be passed along resulting in a higher hourly rate for fixed-price projects.

Our incentive would also be to spend more (too much) time on planning and QA which would increase the total project cost.

We have, therefore, for the sake of simplicity, decided on a straight-forward pricing model where we charge hourly.

We basically never offer fixed prices (read more). A fixed price model is a different approach altogether. Companies who offer fixed prices might need to charge a bit more per hour, add greater buffers to their quotes and require a bureaucratic inflexible process when clients request changes.

Nothing says that a fixed price model is cheaper. Contact us if you are looking for a truly quality-oriented software development partner.